Posted 4 years ago on Dec. 8, 2012, 10:27 p.m. EST by therising
(6643)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

To all the conservatives and libertarians out there: Please tell me your definition of "successful". Is successful to you being walled up in some gated community with a couple of Cadillacs in your cul de sac? Real success is taking care of yourself but also taking care of others, being responsible to them too and better yet living in community with them. As soon as you so-called conservatives wake the fuck up and realize that only half a life can be had on your own, you'll be a lot happier and the rest of the country won't have to suffer from your delusion of "separate but successful".

What is success? Everytime we try to get at the heart of this, conservative and libertarians keep measuring life by what the computer screen says under the word "balance" when you punch in your bank account number or investment account number. They're just blips on a screen in the end. Blips on a screen.

It matters. It matters to take care of you and your own. It matters to work hard and be responsible. I couldn't agree more. But why do you stop there? Why?

Life could be so much larger if we unseated the hijackers and UNrigged the game so we could live full lives and engage as citizens instead of frittering away this precious gift of life as consumers, consumers measuring our lives by what the blips on the screen say.

How long would you keep playing blackjack at a table with marked cards where only the house could read the markings. Face it. The macro trends of declining income, increasing wealth inequality and dwindling middle class show clearly that the game is rigged. And make no mistake, it's only rigged because we allow it to be. As soon as we, the 99% realize we have more in common than we do separating us, we can begin to make decisions from a position of unified strength rather than demands from a position of divided weakness.

I believe measure of a person is what's in their heart. And that heart only grows whole when its goodness is shared, not hoarded.

Oddly enough, the Occupiers are the True conservatives here as Chris Hedges out it so well. It's the Occupiers that want to restore the rule of law and remove the radical corporatists who have hijacked our great republic.

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Dostoevsky said it pretty well too:

"Today, everyone asserts his own personality and strives to live a full life as an individual. But these efforts lead not to a full life but to suicide, because instead of realizing his personality, man only slips into total isolation. For in our age, man has been broken up into self-contained individuals, each of whom retreats into his lair, trying to stay away from the rest, hiding himself and his belongings from the rest of mankind, and finally isolating himself from people and people from him.

And while he accumulates material wealth in his isolation, he thinks with satisfaction how mighty and secure he has become, because he is mad and cannot see that the more goods he accumulates, the deeper he sinks into suicidal impotence. The reason for this is that he has become accustomed to relying only on himself; he has split off from the whole and become an isolated unit; he has trained his soul not to rely on human help, not to believe in man and mankind, and only to worry that the wealth and privileges he has accumulated may get lost.

Everywhere men today are turning scornfully away from the truth that the security of the individual cannot be achieved by his isolated efforts but only by mankind as a whole.

BUT AN END to this fearful isolation is bound to come and all men will understand how unnatural it was for them to have isolated themselves from one another. This will be the spirit of the new era and people will look in amazement at the past when they sat in darkness and refused to see the light. . .
. . . Until that day, we must keep hope alive, and now and then a man must set an example, even if only an isolated one, by trying to lift his soul out of its isolation and offering it up in an act of brotherly communion, even if he is taken for one of God's fools.

17 Comments

Perhaps you are operating on the fallacy that dollars and affairs or the heart are mutually exclusive.
Money is necesary for every facet of life from the womb to the tomb.
Money is the means of honest, noble exchange between individuals.
A person has a need. Person number 2 has the means to fill that need (materiallistically). The first person has that need met, and they feel better and are better. Person #2 has money as payment that they can use to better themselves or others.
What is a charitable donation? It is not a good intention or a heartfelt stab. It is an exchange of money or goods that require money to produce.
The 99% makes a statement everytime they chose to make a purchase or not make a purchase. They make a statement everytime they choose to use or not use a lending institution.
The power of the consumer is more powerful than almost any government mandate or shackle.

the rest is mamby-pamby gibberish that you would spout around a campfire with a joint.
Living as a community and brotherly love is a vague, open-ended invitation to dictatorship. there is no such thing as national brotherhood; nor should there be. Even if I had an interest in, for example, helping the Eskimos in Alaska, I would not begin to presume to know what they would need. Neither would the folks in Washington. Yet they believe it to be right to tax the shit out of the producers and then go on a national campaign to help in areas where they have no clue.
National brotherhood is robin hood with a gun. And I want no part of that. Community teamwork is at the state level, at the very largest, and at local and community level, at its most ideal.
I wish to share goodness with others, voluntarily. If it is done through coersion, or taxes, which is essentially the same thing, then it takes away from the principle of giving

I feel like we are trying to communicate across the Atlantic with a bull horn. I am not implying that I care for nothing but my own little lot in life. But, oh hell. Talk to me when you see your hard earned savings go to a slouch.

You're frustration is genuine but misdirected. Don't be mad at the government. Be mad at the corporatists who HIJACKED our government. Strong government could have prevented the 2008 financial crisis that wiped out the savings of so many. Seen the film inside job?

What will the future say as they look back upon us .. ? as with hindsight being 20/20 and they watch history unfold.. what will they see ? 200 years from now .. 500 years from now .. will they study to understand what the struggle was all about .. ? will they wonder .. and puzzle over every detail ..Will they never want to go back , to live the lives of the past..